The past can't save you
Baseball, Iowa, Obama, and the fictions we tell ourselves
On August 21, 2021, the New York Yankees played the Chicago White Sox at the Field of Dreams in Dyersville, Iowa.
The game marked a moment when nostalgia for a fictional past was made manifest. But despite the heavily manufactured atmosphere of charming Americana, the game had its moments of uncomfortable reality.
When the players walked out of the corn stalks, they commented on how uncomfortable and itchy they were. The corn itself was constructed like a Potemkin village, propped up with zip ties and fiberglass rods after being leveled by a recent storm. (Baseball players who tried to eat some of the ears of corn immediately spit the kernels back out, learning the hard way that the majority of the corn in the US is grown for livestock feed and ethanol production.) Guy Fieri even created a hot dog encased in apple pie crust. The metaphor wasn’t even subtle; this was a manufactured version of what we believe America should be. What we so desperately want it to be. And what it never ever has been.
The Field of Dreams was originally built for the 1989 Kevin Costner movie that gave it its name. The movie, based on the book “Shoeless Joe,” is about a man named Ray Kinsella who is on the verge of losing his family farm. After being visited by the ghost of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, the former Chicago White Sox player who was part of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Kinsella builds a baseball field in the middle of his farm. It’s a romantic gesture and a story about family, the past, and the future, all combined with hope in the face of insurmountable odds.
The movie came out right after the farm crisis of the 1980s devastated the Midwest. Many families were left barely hanging onto their land and their lives, hoping for something to save them. The movie was a hit. And the field, which was built specifically for the movie, became a shrine to baseball, nostalgia, masculinity, loss and hope.
The movie, which ties into Kinsella’s dysfunctional relationship with his long-dead father, is about something that never existed. Kinsella could never go back and make his father a better person or fix their relationship. But he could play baseball, one of the few good things they shared. For Kinsella, building the field is an act of redemption, for his childhood. He can’t redeem the past, but he can change the future. He’s not forgetting, he’s rebuilding.
(Just as an aside, it’s pretty ironic that in the movie, Kinsella’s wife, Annie, gives a speech against banning books in schools. Meanwhile, Iowa’s government is currently finding new and creative ways to ban books in schools, while Iowa’s governor gives millions in grants to honor a movie that spoke out against that very thing.)
It is easy in this moment to wish for a simpler time. But what we are grieving for isn’t a lost America. It’s a lost ignorance.
The game in 2021 was ridiculous. It was like if Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore had reunited to reenact the pottery scene from Ghost for $1,400 a ticket. But the game happened in an America still reeling from the shutdowns and losses from the Covid pandemic. Trump had lost the election. But the January 6 insurrection had shaken the foundations of democracy. People were looking for something good about America, something innate to hold on to, and the best they could come up with was a fiction.
But this fiction has been embraced more closely than any truth about America. When news of the $80 million development broke, fans were quick to criticize the commodification of the site.
Chris Williams, publisher of the Iowa State fan site Cyclone Fanatic, lamented, “Am I the only person who fears all of this growth around the original site is going to ruin the site’s quiet, nostalgic appeal? Hope I am wrong…” He wasn’t the only one.
Dave Dreezsen, managing editor of the Sioux City Journal, tweeted, “Glad I got to visit and experience the site when it was still quiet with a nostalgic feel. All the commercial development has ruined that.”
This wasn’t the first time those concerns were voiced. In 2012, after Go the Distance LLC bought the field, columnists and residents worried about losing that “nostalgic” feel to the site.
The comments spoke to something lost. Of something ruined. But what? The movie is fantasy. Everything about the site and the story is contrived. The field didn’t exist before it was built for the movie. Even the America depicted in the book doesn’t and has never existed.
Expressing nostalgia over the Field of Dreams is a bit like expressing nostalgia for the good old days when children could walk through magical wardrobes and commune with talking lions. The sense of loss over the field is a longing for a fiction — something that never existed. Something manufactured to tell a story about the Midwest that simply isn’t true.
But it’s significant that in America’s heartland, more money is being poured into creating a fiction than preserving actual history.
Field of Dreams fans aren’t the only ones lamenting a past that never existed. Prairie dresses are back in fashion; manufactured barn wood signs are sold in home stores across America. Amish romance fiction has spiked in popularity and is known for depicting a life that is not at all Amish, but an idealized version of a past that never existed. Similarly, hit television shows like “Sweet Magnolias” and “Yellowstone” depict people fighting to defend a romanticized past.
Trad wives on social media model a life that is purely a fiction, contrived as a return to “gender norms” — when women took care of the home, and husbands were the providers. Even that has never been true. Black women have historically been employed outside the home. And those happy white housewives of the 1950s? They were addicted to painkillers.
Country music still dominates our cultural zeitgeist, spinning narratives about the good old places, the good old days. But good old days for whom? Certainly not anyone not white, cisgendered and male.
In a recent op-ed, Tressie McMillan Cottom writes about Obama Derangement Syndrome — obsessing over the idea that the former president should come back and save us. She writes that the America of Barack Obama that some people long to return to doesn’t exist anymore. And even when it did exist, it wasn’t as beautiful and brilliant as we want to remember.
Even the return to the waifish body ideal is emblematic of an America that doesn’t want to deal with the realities and agency of grown women, but the imagined and fetishized innocence of the virgin teen.
We have all lost so much these past few years. And we will continue to lose. Cuts to healthcare, SNAP benefits and foreign aid programs; rollbacks of reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights; deportations violently separating families; government policies supporting wars that target children and families — all of this is devastating our country and our humanity. Even if you are insulated from the consequences of the government’s violence, the economic realities still manifest themselves in the rising cost of living and the stagnant wages, and structural and systemic loneliness.
It is easy in this moment to wish for a simpler time. But what we are grieving isn’t a lost America. It’s a lost ignorance.
Construction to the Field of Dreams has prevented any games from being planned there since 2022. Although for what it’s worth, the mayor of Dyersville anticipates an MLB game in 2026. That might be a bit of wishcasting. There is no evidence that the previous games were good investments for Major League Baseball. Often the cost of creating such an elaborated fiction is more than it’s worth.
This essay is a significantly revised version of an essay I wrote in 2021.
Further Reading:
This was a pretty solid story about the 2021 Field of Dreams game from Defector.
In March, I wrote about nostalgia and Chuck Grassley and what actually happened to America.
Does anyone else feel like it’s mostly cis white men who long for the days of old? I don’t know many women/minorities/children (notable exception trad wife influencers) who would want to go back? We are fighting the same old structures that kept us out of health, wealth and happiness. Why would we want to go back to a WORSE time? Sigh.
I loved field of dreams but was appalled that anyone would try to create one in the flesh.
I have my own feelings of nostalgia for playing baseball in the Summer and remember the fields of my childhood where I could never hit or field.
One note re working women, in fact white women worked in cotton mills, shirt factories... as waitresses and so on. It was only in middle class jobs where women did not work after marriage. So my grandmother sewed shirts. And many women too in washing - so worked in the home but for money.